Month: November 2015

So, last year, The Male and I went off on vacation to the Isle of Man. Ever since we had married, he’d been saying that he wanted to visit, as he had heard all his life how his family had roots there.

We made our plans, talking about what details he knew about these ancestors. “I think I remember the name as Edward O’Garrett. I guess we lost the O along the way.”

The night before we left, my mother-in-law brought out an old type-written paper, with all the details about the Garretts who came to America. What timing!

Turns out, the name was Garrett all along. Edward O. Garrett. O for Osborn!

Armed with the information in this document, we flew off to London, not really knowing what would come of this journey.
After traveling through Avebury and Oxford, we flew from Manchester over the Irish Sea to Douglas, the capital of the IoM.

Our first drizzly morning there, we discovered that our B&B was (providentially) only a 10 minute walk up from the hill to the Manx Museum. This island nation is so small, all the archives are in one place, in this lovely little museum. But, we had no idea of that when we embarked. All we had was this piece of paper.
Which turned out to be more than enough to make our heads spin a bit.

For years, my siblings and I have heard about a little boy, one who died very young, who was possibly a sibling to our mother, an only child.

There are lots of stories like this in our family; short on details and long on speculation.

But, thanks to the incredible modern day tool that is the internet, I have found this little boy.

I recently signed up for a My Heritage full-access account, and I have been using the research tool compulsively.

“Dinner’s ready, but I just need to do one more search. You’ll never guess what I just found!”

Researching this morning, rather than tackling the list of tasks at hand, I found a family tree on another site that listed my grandmother, Vida Bula Gard Wells, her sister, Dola Zella Gard Strong (obviously both of whom we knew about), and their brother, Lex Bion Gard.

I tried to not get very excited, as I’ve learned already in this new genealogy adventure that there are probably LOADS of people with names similar to what I’m searching for.

I dug a little deeper, until I found a record on FindAGrave.com.

And, there he is. Little Lex, older brother to Vida and Dola. Born June 2, 1888, and died at two years and two months on August 13, 1890.

I’m confident that this is correct; the parents’ names are my great grandparents’ names, and the location is correct.

I also found another record that mentions an unnamed child born between Vida and Dola, but I will need to do a little more digging.